The
East Is Red

7 July
2011

The East Is Red is an epic music
play with collection of Chinese songs and dances that
highlight the crucial events taken place in China in the
first half of the 20th century.

The play was first staged on 2 October 1964 at the Great
Hall of the People, with 3,500 actors involved in the performance.
Hu Jintao, the current Chinese President and the chief of
CCP, also at one stage participated in the show with his
fellow college students from Tsinghua University. The play
was made into a wide screen colour movie a year later by
a joined team from Beijing Film Studio, August First Film
Studio and China Central Newsreel and Documentary Film Studio.

Despite the voice of the woman narrator is unbearably over
excited and the comments by the both narrators might be a
little too subjective, the artistic and historical remits
of the play are not compromised as the majority tunes featured
were the pop songs of the respective corresponding times.